Feedback loop

This blogger went to the New England Educational Assessment "dialogues across the disciplines" workshop last week.  Did the mention of "assessment" put you to sleep?  Actually, it was a great day--good information, fascinating people, and real evidence of and tools for what higher education could be doing better to engage students and help them to learn.  Folks from the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts presented findings from their Wabash Study on student learning of liberal arts outcomes.  It turns out that good teaching seems to help students to learn better!  Yes, obvious.  What might be less obvious is that good (clear, organized, passionate) teaching actually seems to result in students scoring higher on outcomes such as moral reasoning, critical thinking, and even the desire and ability to engage with diversity.  It's not JUST the material students are learning in these areas--students' perceptions of faculty as caring, passionate, and organized is correlated with higher achievement of liberal arts goals.

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As I said, it was a great conference, and I'll be unpacking the tools and information I gained for weeks to come.  THIS week, I decided to focus on the "feedback loop" part of organized teaching.  Feedback from faculty that is prompt and responsive is high on the list of things that facilitate learning.  

My Logic students turn in a weekly set of exercises every Monday.  This time, rather than picking up assignments (or, sometimes I allow students to "workshop" their exercises in small groups, then I pick them up), I went over the full assignment with students, allowing them to ask questions when they missed points, and demonstrating some skills on the whiteboard that I thought might be tricky.  I guided students in assigning grades, and then recorded them individually in my gradebook.  That way, students knew immediately what they had trouble with on the assignment.  Did I mention that an added benefit was that I didn't have to grade their papers?

Obviously, this strategy to giving prompt and responsive feedback won't work on most kinds of assignments.  In this case, there were clear right and wrong answers, and the stakes were pretty low gradewise (the benefits outweighed, I thought, the risk that students would inflate their scores on this fairly small assignment).  I'm going to keep doing it when appropriate, and then work hard to grade things more promptly when I pick up homework to grade myself.

Let us know about your tools and tricks for prompt and responsive feedback!